The significance now of made in China

In the old days, one of the jokes about the Indian ability to replicate things concerned the thinnest piece of wire being produced in the west. Handed over to various nations along with a challenge to better the effort if they could, it finally came into Indian hands. And it was duly returned with the words “Made in India” stamped on it. We’ve moved on a bit now. These days, examples of such appropriation seem to reside in the names attached to buildings and housing societies. So, it isn’t unusual to find an advertisement extolling the virtues of living in, say, a Coventry Grange in Gurgaon, a Beach Grove in Bangalore or a Pinewood in Noida.

Our appropriation seems merely evocative. But the Chinese are cloning, apart from mobiles, western landmarks, even whole towns. Thus, a clone of the Eiffel Tower now stands in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, a replica of London’s Tower Bridge in Suzhou in Jiangsu province, and a Manhattan lookalike is coming up in Tianjin. Part of the city of Hiuzhou has even been constructed to resemble the Austrian town of Hallstatt. Things have come to such a pass that British architect Zaha Hadid, reports say, is planning legal action after her famous Wangjing Soho building in Beijing was replicated by “pirate architects” in the city of Chongqing. On the replicatory scale, China, it seems, is now No 1.